Last Chair

Stanley Kepler was fixing the fence when the moving truck pulled in next door. That was three winters ago, the first week of November. He remembered it because his hands were cold and the wire kept slipping and then there was a woman in the driveway waving at him with both arms.

He took off a glove and waved back. She yelled something across the gravel that he didn't catch.

"What?" he called.

"I said, do you know if the trash guy comes on Tuesday or Thursday?" She was maybe thirty-eight, tall, wearing a puffy coat that looked too warm for the walk she'd taken from the truck. "The landlord told me both and I don't believe him."

"Tuesday," Stanley said. "Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Holidays. He slides to Wednesday."

She nodded like that was real information and worth keeping. Then she went back to the truck and Stanley went back to the fence, and the first conversation was over. Fourteen winters of empty A-frame next door and the new person asked him about trash.

Her name was Jessi Hudson. He learned it two days later when she came over with a plate of cookies and said, "I'm Jessi, I work from home on a computer, so if you hear me swearing at my screen at two in the afternoon, that's what that is." She was thirty-eight, she said. She'd come up from Portland. She skied.

"You ski?" she asked, standing on his step in the cold.

"Every day there's snow."

"Me too. Where do I get the good runs?"

"You'll figure it out."

She laughed at that and he heard it through the door after she left. He remembered thinking she was going to be trouble, and he remembered being right about that, just not in the way he'd expected.

* * *

The trouble was that she skied the first chair. Every day, 8:30, unless the mountain was closed or she was sick. She'd ride up alone, board down, and by the time Stanley had finished his morning grooming runs and gotten back to the patrol shack, she was already on her second lap or her third. He could see the lift line from the shack window. He knew her jacket, green and black, before he knew much else about her.

For three winters that was the arrangement. He said "Mornin'" and she said "Mornin'" back. Once, when a snowboarder clipped her at the bottom of Lower Grace, he ran a sweep and checked her over and she said she was fine and he said good and that was it. Once she left cookies in the shack. Nobody claimed them and he ate four and told Gerald they were anonymous.

"You know who they're from," Gerald said. Gerald was the lift supervisor, fifty-five, been at Silveridge since before Stanley was born there, more or less. "You've got crumbs on your collar."

"Anonymous cookies," Stanley said.

Gerald was married twenty years to a woman named Angela, who moved to Arizona for the dry air and took the good furniture with her. They still talked on the phone every couple weeks. Gerald said it was the most honest relationship he'd ever had and Stanley never knew what to do with that, so he let it sit.

"You could just talk to her," Gerald said one morning in March. They were watching the lift line from the shack, the usual crew of locals, and the green and black jacket at the front of it.

"Talk to her about what?"

"Anything. The weather. The mud that's coming. You're not a mute, Kepler."

"I say mornin' every day."

"You say mornin' every day to a woman you've watched ski for three winters like she's the ten o'clock report." Gerald shook his head. "I've seen you handle a dislocated shoulder with more words than that."

Stanley didn't have a good answer so he didn't give one. The truth was he'd tried to start sentences in his head a hundred times and none of them survived. She came down the hill, she went up the lift, and whatever he'd rehearsed evaporated between one lap and the next. He figured she had a life. Remote job, friends, probably somebody in Portland she still texted. A guy like that, some photographer maybe, some guy with a nice coat. It wasn't his business and he was good at keeping things not his business. Four winters ago a bartender came through for a season and left in April and he hadn't chased her and that had been fine. That had been the pattern. People leave in April. That's what April is.

* * *

The mud showed up early that spring. By the second week of April the base was gray and the lower runs were brown stripes and the lifts closed at 3:00 instead of 4:00 because nobody was riding past 2:00 anyway. The end-of-season patrol party got announced on a Thursday, posted on the shack door on a piece of printer paper that somebody had drawn a beer on.

Stanley was stacking helmets when the door opened and Jessi came in with another woman behind her. He knew the friend by sight, Suzi, dark hair, worked remote like Jessi, forty years old, loud in the coffee shop in a way that made the baristas like her.

"This is him," Suzi said, pointing at Stanley like he was a display item. "This is the guy."

"The guy what?" Stanley said.

"The guy Jessi watches every morning," Suzi said. "Which I only found out this week, by the way, after three winters of her telling me about the first chair like it's a weather report." Jessi was smiling. She had her helmet under her arm. "You never said you were a patroller."

"Didn't come up."

"Fourteen words a season and none of them come up." She looked at the helmet rack, the sleds, the paper with the beer on it. "So there's a party."

"End of season," Stanley said. "Saturday. Up at the deck."

"We're coming," Suzi said. "She's coming. I'm making her."

"You don't have to make me," Jessi said. "I invited myself the second I read the sign."

"You read the sign because I read it out loud in the coffee shop."

"Which is a form of self-invitation." She turned back to Stanley. "Is it a real party or a stand-around-and-be-cold party?"

"Both. There's a fire pit."

"Good enough." She put her helmet back on her arm. "Hey, real question. Is the mountain going to make it to closing weekend? Suzi says the bottom of Lower Grace is basically a river."

"The bottom of Lower Grace is a river," Stanley said. "The rest holds. Snow's deep up top this year."

"How deep?"

"Six feet where it packs. More in the gullies."

"In Portland it rains and everyone acts like it's a personal attack." She shook her head. "Here the ground just gives up and turns to soup and nobody says anything."

"That's mud," Stanley said. "It does that."

"Gerald told me you groom at 4:00 in the morning. Is that true? Suzi says Gerald told me."

Stanley looked past her at Gerald, who was very busy with a clipboard.

"4:30," Stanley said.

"That's insane. What time do you go to bed?"

"Early."

"He's not going to tell you," Suzi said to Jessi. "I've watched this. He answers the question behind the question and then he answers nothing."

"I answer things," Stanley said.

"Name one thing you've answered," Suzi said.

Stanley thought about it. "The trash comes Tuesday."

Jessi laughed, the same laugh from the driveway three winters ago, and something in his chest did the thing it did every morning at 8:30 when the green jacket came around the corner of the shack.

"Saturday, then," she said, backing toward the door. "Fire pit. I'll bring something. Suzi will bring more something."

They went out and Gerald set the clipboard down very slowly.

"Not a word," Stanley said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I was going to say," Gerald said, "that in forty years of watching this mountain, the quiet ones either figure it out by closing weekend or they watch the truck leave, same as always." He picked the clipboard back up. "That's all I was going to say."

Stanley stacked another helmet. Saturday was two days off. The mountain had maybe a week left in it. He did the math on it more times than he'd admit to anyone, including the math about people leaving in April, and for the first time in three winters the math bothered him.

The party was exactly what he'd said it would be. A fire pit, a stand-around-and-be-cold part, and a crowd of patrollers and lift ops and a few locals who showed up every year regardless of whether anyone invited them.

Jessi brought a bag of lemons and a bottle of tequila. Suzi brought two bottles of wine and a speaker and played music off her phone until a lift op named Logan asked her to switch to something with less bass.

"This is a mountain," Logan said.

"This is a party," Suzi said.

"It's a closing party. There's a difference."

"There's not a difference."

"There's a difference," Logan said, and walked off, and Suzi turned the bass up.

Stanley stood on the far side of the fire with a beer he wasn't drinking. Gerald came over at some point with a folding chair and set it down and sat in it without asking anyone.

"Angela called yesterday," Gerald said. "She wants to know if I'm eating."

"Are you eating?"

"I'm eating. She took the good furniture and left me the good pan, so I'm fine." Gerald held his hands out toward the fire. "So. Saturday's almost done. You figure it out yet?"

"Figure what out."

"You know what out."

"I know what out," Stanley said.

Gerald nodded at the other side of the fire, where Jessi was laughing at something Suzi said. The lemons sat on the table next to the tequila, and people kept slicing them and making faces and drinking anyway.

"She came," Stanley said.

"She came."

"That's something."

"That's nothing," Gerald said. "Coming to a party is nothing. People come to parties. The question is what happens after the party."

Stanley didn't answer that, because he didn't have an answer, and Gerald seemed okay with that, which was one of the reasons Gerald was his boss and also his friend.

The fire burned down around 10:00. Logan left. Suzi left earlier than that, walking downhill with two lift ops who were arguing about something she kept saying was not her problem. By 10:30 it was mostly embers and six people, and then it was embers and three, and then Jessi was standing next to Stanley with her hands in her jacket pockets saying she should probably walk home.

"It's a gravel road," Stanley said. "I'll walk with you."

"It's a gravel road I live on. You live on it too. It's the same road."

"I know it's the same road."

"So walk with me," she said, and he did.

The road went down from the deck and then curved along the tree line. There was no moon worth mentioning. His boots made the sound they always made on gravel, and hers made the same sound a half-step behind his, and for a while neither of them said anything, which was normal, because fourteen words a season had been the deal for three winters and fourteen words can carry you a long way down a gravel road if you ration them.

Then she said, "So. Closing weekend."

"Closing weekend."

"Are you a summer person or a winter person? Suzi thinks you're a winter person. She thinks you hibernate."

"I work summers," Stanley said. "Mountain biking patrol. Crews on the lifts. It's quieter."

"But you stay."

"I stay."

She was quiet for a few steps. Then, "I stay too. I signed a lease through next March. I already told Suzi and she acted like I'd announced a pregnancy."

"That's Suzi."

"That's Suzi." She laughed a little. "I told her because she keeps saying everyone leaves in April and I wanted her to stop saying it."

Stanley didn't say anything. The math he'd been doing all week did itself again without his permission. She stays. Lease through March. That was new information and it changed the shape of the whole problem and he stood there walking downhill feeling the shape of it change and still not saying a word.

"You're quiet," Jessi said.

"I'm always quiet."

"I know. I've had three years of quiet. I've gotten pretty fluent in it." She stopped walking. They were at the flat stretch before the two houses, past the little stand of aspens that went white in the winter. "Stanley."

"Yeah."

She reached out and put her hand on his arm. Just his forearm, over the sleeve of his jacket, and she left it there. The whole arm lit up. It felt like the first minute of a morning shift when the radio crackles and says lift three and you go from half-asleep to wide awake in one second. Voltage, basically. That was the honest word for it and he didn't say it out loud because he wasn't saying anything out loud.

"Do you ever get tired of it?" she asked. "The quiet."

"Sometimes."

"Me too, lately." Her hand was still on his arm. He could feel the exact spots her fingers were, four spots through a jacket sleeve, which seemed like too much information for four spots to carry. "I keep thinking this is the last weekend, and I keep thinking about the first chair, and how it's the only appointment I've never once wanted to cancel."

"It's a good chair," Stanley said.

"It's a good chair," she agreed.

He should have said it there. He knew that even as it was happening. She had her hand on his arm, on a dark gravel road, with the fire behind them and the lease